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Ten years ago, Mahmoud Abbas accompanied Yasser Arafat to Washington, where he signed the Oslo Accords. The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus reported the atmosphere: “Out on the South Lawn, the mood was festive. The invited guests — including members of Congress, Supreme Court justices, diplomats and Who’s Who of those who had sought to make peace in the Middle East for decades — chatted and snapped photographs. … The crowd, rising to its feet as the dignitaries entered the lawn, seemed most eager to see Arafat. … When Abbas shook hands with [Israeli leaders Yitzhak] Rabin and [Shimon] Peres, the audience reacted almost viscerally, with a collective ‘Whoa’ sweeping the crowd. Then, as [President] Clinton almost physically propelled Rabin and Arafat toward each other, the cheer was even more intense and the crowd stood in awe at what it had witnessed.”

As that ceremony demonstrated, we Americans desperately wish for peace in the Middle East. There’s nothing wrong with that, provided we do not allow wishful thinking to cloud our judgment.

Throughout the decade that followed that ceremony on the White House lawn, Palestinians, aided by Arab states, continued to launch terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians. As Natan Sharansky mordantly observes, Americans and Israelis convinced themselves that it was good to make a deal with a terrorist and dictator like Mr. Arafat because he would have the power to “crack down” on Hamas and other violent elements within Palestinian society.

In reality, it was Mr. Arafat’s illegitimacy, among other factors, that doomed peace prospects. Could this corrupt terrorist, head of at least a dozen different security agencies and holder of the purse strings of the whole Palestinian Authority, give up the terrorism that justified his position? Of course not.

Fascists and tyrants make war. It was not just that Mr. Arafat proved unwilling to crack down on Hamas and the rest. The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, part of his Fatah organization, carried out much of the killing. When Mr. Clinton told Mr. Arafat, at one point in the negotiations, “Yasser, you’re going to have to get a desk,” he was hitting upon the heart of the problem. Mr. Arafat was never going to permit the kind of peace that would force him to retire to deskwork.

President Bush has departed from the usual American script in these matters by first insisting upon new Palestinian leadership. That took guts. The State Department, the United Nations and the European Union would have continued to serve tea to Mr. Arafat forever. But how much of a change does the mere appointment of Mahmoud Abbas represent?

Mr. Arafat continues to wield power, having made himself head of a new national security council. Though Mr. Abbas has said that resort to terrorism has been a disaster for the Palestinian cause, it is not altogether clear that he accepts the permanent existence of the Jewish state any more than his old boss. He is a hard-liner on the matter of the Palestinian “right of return,” for example, which would cause Israel to cease to exist.

The tendency now to speak of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is actually a victory for Arab propaganda. Until the early 1990s, it was always called the Arab-Israeli conflict because the refusal of the Arab states to accept Israel created the Palestinian refugee problem in the first place. Today, the Saudis, though nominally a U.S. ally, continue to spread the ugliest propaganda against Israel imaginable. And together with Mr. Arafat, they have transformed the populations of the West Bank and Gaza into cauldrons of white-hot hatred.

For an example of one of the milder forms of propaganda that is daily fare in the areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority, watch the television program that was broadcast on the day Mr. Bush unveiled the “road map.” It can be viewed at www.zoa.org.

Praising masked men with guns, the music chants over pictures of a Jewish man and his wife, “Foreigners have no place in this land. … Pour fire on their settlements. … Keep the cauldron burning.”

A Pew Global Attitudes poll recently found that 80 percent of Palestinians believe that “the rights and needs of the Palestinian people cannot be taken care of so long as the state of Israel exists.”

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